Canon Pixma iP4500 - problem with colours

Mike Clarke jmc-freebsd2 at milibyte.co.uk
Thu Oct 2 11:00:23 UTC 2008


On Wednesday 01 October 2008, Roland Smith wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 03:46:29PM +0100, Mike Clarke wrote:
> > I've just installed a Canon Pixma iP4500 on a 6.3 system using CUPS
> > and gutenprint. Black printing is fine but I've got problems with
> > colours. The colour wheel on the CUPS test page comes out as a
> > psychedelic collection of brightly coloured rings. If I print from
> > gimp then the correct colours appear but they are very dark and
> > "muddy". The colours start to look a bit more reasonable from the
> > gimp if I push the gamma value up to 2.
>
> Have you installed a .ppd file for this printer? This is a file that
> tells cups about the capabilities of this printer.

I'm using the ppd file bundled with cups 
(/usr/local/share/cups/model/gutenprint/5.1/en_GB/stp-bjc-PIXMA-iP4500.5.1.ppd.gz).

> See
> http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Canon-PIXMA_IP43
>00_OR_PIXMA_IP4500
>
> I'm not sure if just installing the ppd file works. It does for my
> PostScript printer.

That didn't work for me. I couldn't find anywhere to download just the 
ppd file file so I downloaded cnijfilter-ip4500series_2.80-1_i386.deb 
from Canon's site and extracted the ppd file from that with tar. That 
failed with the message "Unable to 
execute /usr/local/libexec/cups/filter/pstocanonij: No such file or 
directory". Then I edited the cupsfilter line in the ppd file and 
replaced pstocanonij with rastertogutenprint.5.1 but that just resulted 
in "Gutenprint Fatal error: Corrupted NickName attribute in PPD file".

The link you quoted implied that the IP4300 driver might also work for 
the IP4500 so I tried to configure it as an IP4300 but it only spat out 
a blank page when I tried a test print.

Interestingly the CUPS test page 
(/usr/local/share/cups/data/testprint.ps) only produces the psychedelic 
rings in the colour wheel if I print it from the local CUPS web page or 
from KGhostView, if I open it with the gimp and print from there I get 
the correct colour pattern but with very muddy colours.

-- 
Mike Clarke


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